I use a program to try & make my images look as they did in life. I wish I could fix the world just as easily. Steel bars with the offer of hot wings behind them. A security camera painted green so as to blend into the roof. I don’t live near places like this.
This is downtown Nashville. A few blocks away the scene began to improve, I saw some of Vanderbilt’s campus & gasped at the stone wall, that had to be the original, built in 1873. I was upset that I left my camera in Birmingham. It didn’t matter though, because I had no time to capture anything other what I could, through the closed & locked door of our car with my iPhone. We were on the way to meet my Maybe surgeon.
An appointment we drove three hours to get to. When we reached the scary exit ramps, the 180 degree turns, the 6 lanes of traffic, packed with other drivers you hope know what they are doing. My husband suddenly becomes Superman, because he sailed through that city like he lived there. He even slowed down on an exit ramp because coming up the other ramp, was an old delivery truck painted cotton candy pink, dressed like a pig, but then as it passed it had written on the side “Sex Toys” that was the photograph I missed. Man, the pictures I miss, stick to my brain like glue, as the good ones drift into the past like mist…
I loved my Surgeon. His name is the same as my twin brother. His smile reached his eyes, he laughed at my jokes & then would stop on a dime, because he is an important gifted surgeon, no time for silly. He was tall, over six feet. The guy who took my X-rays was way over six feet. The door opened in the middle of our meeting & another surgeon entered, he was over six feet. That is when I asked if it was a prerequisite to be over six feet to be employed at Vanderbilt. The tall surgeon who entered bent his knees so that he appear less so. Sweet man, he quickly stood tall & became serious.

My surgeon spent an hour with us. He used his pen from his pocket to draw the ‘steel bars’ across my hip bones that will help me walk better. My X-rays came to him on cheap office paper. He said he has done surgeries like mine over three dozen times or so in the last year. He said that he usually puts hips back together to people “who are hit by trains, or fall off houses or out of airplanes.” He was serious. Damn. Vanderbilt (I refuse to belittle such a legendary institution by calling it Vandy. I mean, can you see Johns Hopkins calling itself Johnny Hop?) got through to the steel bar put in place at Blue Cross to get me a pre-cert order for a CT. The nurses at Vanderbilt called three different places in Nashville to see if I can have my CT done today. I look down at the order, it says, “time” she had written, NOW. We drive to the gas station, put the address into the GPS, find the building, hand the order over to the receptionist, she gives me a restaurant buzzer, I sit down, look beside me at the magazine, a favorite, Smithsonian, I started reading an article, got called in, got zapped, stick the old magazine  into my medical folder & then returned it…

Steel bars on the windows to help keep those safe inside, (unless danger walks in through the front door). Steel bars are used to help hold someone together.

This world is an amazing place. Opposites, contradictions, beautiful, ugly, mean, sweet, over six feet tall, short, smart and not so smart, surgery or no surgery.

My surgery will happen this month. I will be in the bed or using a walker, really trying to use just my hands to prevent my feet from touching the floor, for six weeks, a few months of PT & I will be standing tall.

I enjoyed the ride home driven by Superman reading my Smithso…magazine.